Imagine you’re a policy analyst asked to forecast the 'population' of a city twenty years from now. You run your regressions, check your trends, and deliver a report. But have you ever stopped to ask where the category of 'population' even came from? Or why we assume time is a linear resource to be managed? Often, what we call 'foresight' is really just a way of pinning the present onto the future, ensuring that the structures of today—and the people who run them—remain exactly where they are.

In this seminal article, Sohail Inayatullah breaks down the hidden assumptions that govern how we think about tomorrow. He categorizes foresight into three distinct epistemologies: the predictive-empirical, the cultural-interpretative, and the critical-post-structural. While most practitioners are trained to look for 'future facts' and data-driven trends, Inayatullah argues that this empirical focus often serves to 'domesticate' time, turning the unknown into a technical problem for experts to solve rather than a space for genuine social transformation.

The paper's most radical contribution is the move toward a 'critical' futures study. Drawing on post-structuralist philosophy, Inayatullah suggests that instead of trying to predict what will happen, we should focus on making the present 'remarkable'—that is, showing that our current way of life is a historical choice, not an inevitability. By deconstructing the language and power structures that define our reality, we can 'decolonize' the future and open up space for entirely different ways of being.

Tune in as we explore how to break free from 'mental frozenness' and start reconstructing the future from the ground up.

Ref:
Sohail Inayatullah. Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Future: Predictive, cultural and critical epistemologies. Futures, March 1990, 115-141. ISSN 0016-3287.